Friday, October 31, 2014

It’s
Halloween, the time when the membrane between the worlds is especially thin,
when we honor our ancestors and appreciate all they’ve given us. About seven weeks ago, I lost my dad, and so
when I think of the spirit world today, I think of him. I’m grateful not just for the life he gave
me, but for the lessons he taught me. And
when I open the box of photographs he left me, all these other ancestors crowd
out, and each life has a message for me.

There’s
something very essential about this time of the year. People masquerade, as if they know that these
personalities we adopt, these roles we play, are just costumes of the
moment. We’re all elemental forces,
walking for a time in this world. We
have just enough time to draw a few strokes in its pattern, but not enough time
to look at it and see how it all fits together.
That’s something our descendants do for us, after we’re gone.

It
makes sense that this time comes a month after the balancing act of the fall
equinox. At that time, we measure the
dark and the light and see that they’re equal.
At this time, we measure life and death, and see that they are also two
sides of the same coin.

Yes,
I’m writing this on Halloween, but the whole of the month has this intensity, this
essentialist flavor. The lightest moments
in November are actually the first days of the month, when Mercury sextiles Jupiter,
and everybody gets that playful vibe.
After this, the energy intensifies, becomes deeper and more
introspective.

This
is Saturn’s last month in Scorpio.
Archetypically, Saturn is the Crone, the Old Wise One, the Teacher. Scorpio is the sign of secrets, death, and
transformation. Saturn has been in Scorpio
for two and a half years, and many of her lessons have been about death. It’s been a time when a grim virus has decimated a continent, and when
religious fervor has stepped up its hopeless love affair with the AK-47.

During
this last month, Saturn will have visitors, as the sun, Mercury and Venus are
all going through Scorpio, and each in turn will conjunct Saturn. It’s as if each one goes up to the Crone and
asks her for a deeper wisdom. Venus, the
goddess of love, conjoins Saturn on November 12, and love becomes heavier,
sadder, and more serious. The sun joins Saturn
on November 18, and brings up questions about authority and identity. And Mercury conjuncts Saturn on November 25,
with questions about how to think, and how to learn what we need to know.

Mars,
the planet of action, makes its own pilgrimage this month. It’s in Capricorn, the sign ruled by Saturn,
and it conjuncts Pluto, the planet that rules Scorpio, on November 10. And so Mars pauses too, and accepts its
lesson from the Old Wise One. Its
preference is for the thrill of spontaneous action, but now it has to become
accountable, to see the underlying consequences of action.

And
so it’s a sobering month, punctuated by these Saturn moments. The energy of Saturn is conservative, and its
wisdom tends to be responsible, pragmatic and grounding. It focuses on preserving rather than
changing, on the known rather than the possible, and on a realistic assessment
of existing resources.

It
seems like this would lend itself to a healthier and more ecologically sound
way of living on the earth. But it’s not
easy to move from a society that’s based on elitist and expansive principles to
one that is truly conservative. A truly
conservative system would conserve trees, land, air, and water, and would be
friendlier to families. It wouldn’t
deport fathers, for example, forcing them to leave their children. A truly conservative system would encourage
people to grow food, and to learn how to fix things, rather than urging them to
consume more and more.

So
I do think we could take back the word “conservative” any day now.

The
Saturnine lessons of the month will tell us where we are going wrong, where we
are deviating from an earth-friendly, sustainable way of living. Because Saturn is in Scorpio, the lessons
will be intense, deep, and shadowy. We’ll
peer into those shadows and catch glimpses of all the things we usually refuse
to see.

I
do think people are waking up to the contradictions inherent in the world we
live in. But when we come back to
reality, we can only come back so far.
None of us is ready to see the world as it really is. And so people come up with scapegoats, invent
enemies, and imagine them with more power than they truly possess. And then
they get snagged there, and their way of being conservative involves resisting
these outside forces, one way or another.

And
yet all these villains we see, they’re usually about as dangerous as the masked
children that will run through the neighborhood tonight. When tomorrow’s dawn breaks, we’ll ask
ourselves, Where did they go? Someday
people will ask the same question about us.
And they’ll also look to see what we left behind.